According to The Times, the encryption built into WhatsApp has stymied Justice Department attempts at wiretapping. Even with a judge's wiretap order, WhatsApp's encryption prevents law enforcement from reading or intercepting messages sent on its platform.

This is a problem for the Department of Justice, and it's one without a clear solution. A court could order WhatsApp — which is owned by Facebook — to comply with wiretap orders, but it would face technical and legal challenges.

The problem, at least for the Justice Department, may only be getting tougher.

The Guardian reported on Monday that Facebook, Google and Snapchat are all working to increase their own encryption and privacy in the wake of the Apple vs. FBI showdown.

According to The Guardian, WhatsApp plans on adding encryption to its voice calls in a few weeks. The Guardian says Facebook is also looking at increasing the encryption used for Facebook Messenger.

Snapchat is reportedly also at creating more secure messages, though let's be clear: Snapchat hardly has the best track record with securing user data. Google too is said to be looking at ways use its encryption technology in more places.

Tech companies getting serious about encryption

Last week, Medium's Steven Levy wrote an extraordinary piece chronicling the Crypto Wars from the '90s. Two decades ago, law enforcement and technologists battled over the ideas of encryption.

For a time, it looked like cryptography won, with the Clinton administration basically accepting that for the digital revolution to happen, it would have to happen with crypto.

Standards such as AES-128 (and, later, AES-256), SSL and public keys became part of the tech lexicon and the modern computer security industry was born.

Still, as Levy writes, winning the war doesn't mean everything has been great for consumers (emphasis added):

But here's something that didn't happen: a strong crypto infrastructure that protected our information and privacy. The fact is that while the security industry has boomed, our information really isn't much safer than it was when we were fighting the first crypto war. This is because the tech world has been slow to build strong encryption into our systems as a default. It's been too hard to use, and all too often businesses and institutions don't even take obvious steps to secure data. Chronic lapses in our communications software and disasters happen on almost a daily basis.

...We simply haven't used our capabilities to make our electrical grids, our credit card systems, and our ISPs bulletproof. As a result, the public has not fully reaped the spoils from winning that first crypto war.

But slowly but surely, that has been changing. Maybe it's the public realization that so much of our data is now stored on the cloud. Or perhaps it's the increase in hacks that leave private information vulnerable.

Whatever the reason, even before the most recent Apple vs. FBI nonsense, we've seen tech companies start to get more serious about building better encryption into their products.

If companies want consumers to trust them with their data, they increasingly have to prove that they are capable of protecting that data. And that's possible with encryption.

Which of course, is the big rub for law enforcement.

Two decades ago, the government agreed that the promises of the Clipper Chip — a chip that was designed to protect communications except if there was a government request for access — were simply infeasible (the Clipper Chip project was dropped in 1996 after its encryption technology was hacked). Today, it does seem that we're having similar conversations, although the stakes are different.

On the most recent episode of the HBO show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver does an admirable job dissecting the latest conversation about encryption. It's worth watching.

What's next

If Google, Facebook, Snapachat, Apple and other companies do continue to add better encryption to their platforms by default — and it seems like that is absolutely going to happen — we're going to have to have a much broader discussion in Congress about encryption and its role.

There aren't easy answers, and in a perfect world there could be concessions both sides make that balance the underlying challenges of personal information security versus homeland security.

But for now, it will be interesting to see how law enforcement handles the reality that the tools we use to communicate are going to be more and more difficult to intercept.

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